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Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age
In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age.
In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the width and breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw.
James's ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James's American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James's keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.
In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of world seemed to be in his native land, which he had once considered provincial, lacking in nourishment for the novelist. James thus set forth to refamiliarize himself with the United States, travelling the width and breadth of the land and exercising his acute powers of observation to document all that he saw.
James's ten-month journey across America and its product, the ethnographic work The American Scene, are the focus of Henry James Comes Home, scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s dazzling follow-up to his book Henry James Goes to Paris. Brooks combines biography and criticism to recreate James's American journey, tracing his travels around New England, down south to Florida, across the Midwest, up the coast of California and eventually to Seattle and Portland. For James, being American was "a complex fate," and Brooks shows how James's keen remarks on rampant materialism and the challenges at the heart of democracy are still of enduring relevance to us in this day.
248 pages, Paperback
Published April 15, 2025
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About the author
Peter Brooks
114 books62 followersPeter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 13, 2025
Review posted here first: https://ocreviewofbooks.org/2025/06/1...
In Henry James Comes Home Peter Brooks recreates James’s North American tour of 1904-5 and looks into what James “made of what his nation was on its way to becoming.” The American Scene (1907) is what James made of his journey, and in elucidating that singular work - Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order” - Brooks has made a welcome addition to a subgenre one might call the “biographies of books”: critical studies with a narrative sense, lively accounts of how a particular work came to be written. Like Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary and Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel, Henry James Comes Home tells the story of a style and describes the context of creation; like Betz’s Rilke in Paris and Kennan’s Marquis de Custine, it charts a journey, clarifies an itinerary, and identifies the encounters in which a writer’s later reflections are rooted.
In 1903, after nearly three decades in Europe, where he had gone as a “yearning young American,” James felt time had come to return to “the native, the forsaken scene, now passing…through a thousand stages and changes, and offering an iridescence of fresh prospects.” Brother William’s warning of the “physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you” failed to daunt the artist (as opposed to the mere aesthete) into “giving up, chucking away” his chance to treat the experience of return, to convert it, “through observation, imagination and reflection now at their maturity,” into “vivid and solid material, into a general renovation of one’s too monotonized grab-bag.” Whatever “primitive” “hates” and “aversions” his rediscovered country might inspire will “lose themselves in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction.” To William Dean Howells he flatly declared, “I am hungry for Material.”
James landed at Hoboken on August 30, 1904. After a brief stay with the president of Harper and Brothers at his Jersey shore summer home, where Mark Twain was coincidentally also a guest, he proceeded to William’s retreat in New Hampshire, for an “arcadian” late summer sojourn in which “great straight pines” encircled little lakes to make “the sacred grove and the American classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky” (what a lovely image!). Then to Salem, Concord, Cape Cod; Newport, and the lordly Hudson; motoring with Wharton, Boston ambulations, contemplation of Harvard, and an evening among the graves of his parents and of Alice, “with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading to a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November.”
In the “darkened gorges of masonry” of the “huge jagged city,” James sought traces of his old New York; he found Trinity Church and others “cruelly overtopped” in the working of “that inexorable law of the growing invisibility of churches.” He also studied “the conversion of the alien”: “ingurgitation” at Ellis Island - “settled possession” of certain neighborhoods - “promotion” evinced by the straight teeth and the good shoes of the children. Though his younger brothers had been officers in the 54th Massachusetts, James showed no comparable interest in how African-Americans were faring, I think because he saw them as permanent aliens, unassimilable and fit only to serve. He whimpered over
He pitied the southern gentry as “the people in the world the worst ministered to” and added that he could have “shed tears” when “reflecting that it was for this they had fought and fallen.” A “group of tatterdemalion darkies” at a rail station in Virginia prompted him to advise Northerners that, when considering the “formidable question, which [rises] suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle,” they should remember that “the Southern black” is so repulsive, so “ragged and rudimentary,” as to “disabuse a tactful mind of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about him.” (Of course, they appear “ragged and rudimentary” because their nation was designed, by law and by violent custom, to make and to keep them that way - but this truth has, historically, passed over the heads of most white people.) More contemptuous of native-born blacks than of European immigrants, James presents the reversed image of General Sherman, who announced, in an 1888 essay published in the North American Review (where seven installments of The American Scene would appear in 1905-6), that he had at last come round to black male suffrage. After all, he wrote, they are Americans, and so more familiar than the “Bohemians who reach Castle Garden by thousands every day of the year.” To further complicate this picture of WASP racism, I’ll add that Sherman would have found James’s sensitivity to the plight of Indians mawkish and soft-hearted.
In Philadelphia James found New York’s opposite, a society consanguineous and calm. Washington, too, offered a contrast, a “City of Conversation” (especially so to a guest of Henry Adams) where, socially, the business man wasn’t the sole category of male. “It took no greater intensity of the South than Baltimore could easily give” for him to feel “the huge shadow of the War,” though in Richmond he at first felt nothing - the drab, sour, Northern-looking city was not “grandly sad,” lacked “a nobleness of ruin,” and did not match his “lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic” idea of it; but the artist was there to admonish the aesthete, and James discovered that an aborted capital is naturally drab and sour, and quite interesting for that. By Charleston he was reconciled to straining to see historic romance, and he accepted Florida as a primeval blank, “a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a Sphinx,” still less of a Cleopatra.
Beneath the aesthete who deplored ugliness, beneath the artist who lamented the lack of associational “thickness” needed for his practice of fiction, there sat, animating both, a patriot of sorts, one brooding over the consequences of careless greed and plutocratic nihilism. For James aesthetic impressionability and novelistic analysis were tools to detect and describe the forces he thought menaced “continuity, responsibility, transmission.” James’s method of detection and description, Brooks writes, was to “latch on to an apparently telling detail” and elaborate “an idea that, under the pressure of his imagination and the work of his prose, develops into a kind of imagistic anthropological vision.” The American Scene has a “figural” texture - James’s “language of analysis, eschewing the statistical and the journalistic, found its greatest truth in a continuously analogical and metaphorical discourse.” In James’s “metaphoricity” aspects of the landscape frequently figure as foundling children - abandoned, “unaffiliated,” “unchristened.” And James’s advocacy of architectural preservation, dignified urbanity, and the maintenance of public art and amenity carries a stern warning: a society that builds things so oppressive no one becomes attached to them, and demolishes everything before it can begin to get old, will never be anything but “expensively provisional,” and barely habitable. The American Scene has plenty to make one wince, but enough of its writing is beautiful, enough of its analysis usable; and Brooks is to be thanked for bringing this complicated book closer to our eyes.
In Henry James Comes Home Peter Brooks recreates James’s North American tour of 1904-5 and looks into what James “made of what his nation was on its way to becoming.” The American Scene (1907) is what James made of his journey, and in elucidating that singular work - Auden called it “a prose poem of the first order” - Brooks has made a welcome addition to a subgenre one might call the “biographies of books”: critical studies with a narrative sense, lively accounts of how a particular work came to be written. Like Steegmuller’s Flaubert and Madame Bovary and Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel, Henry James Comes Home tells the story of a style and describes the context of creation; like Betz’s Rilke in Paris and Kennan’s Marquis de Custine, it charts a journey, clarifies an itinerary, and identifies the encounters in which a writer’s later reflections are rooted.
In 1903, after nearly three decades in Europe, where he had gone as a “yearning young American,” James felt time had come to return to “the native, the forsaken scene, now passing…through a thousand stages and changes, and offering an iridescence of fresh prospects.” Brother William’s warning of the “physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you” failed to daunt the artist (as opposed to the mere aesthete) into “giving up, chucking away” his chance to treat the experience of return, to convert it, “through observation, imagination and reflection now at their maturity,” into “vivid and solid material, into a general renovation of one’s too monotonized grab-bag.” Whatever “primitive” “hates” and “aversions” his rediscovered country might inspire will “lose themselves in the act of contemplation, or at any rate in the act of reproduction.” To William Dean Howells he flatly declared, “I am hungry for Material.”
James landed at Hoboken on August 30, 1904. After a brief stay with the president of Harper and Brothers at his Jersey shore summer home, where Mark Twain was coincidentally also a guest, he proceeded to William’s retreat in New Hampshire, for an “arcadian” late summer sojourn in which “great straight pines” encircled little lakes to make “the sacred grove and the American classic temple, the temple for the worship of the evening sky” (what a lovely image!). Then to Salem, Concord, Cape Cod; Newport, and the lordly Hudson; motoring with Wharton, Boston ambulations, contemplation of Harvard, and an evening among the graves of his parents and of Alice, “with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading to a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November.”
In the “darkened gorges of masonry” of the “huge jagged city,” James sought traces of his old New York; he found Trinity Church and others “cruelly overtopped” in the working of “that inexorable law of the growing invisibility of churches.” He also studied “the conversion of the alien”: “ingurgitation” at Ellis Island - “settled possession” of certain neighborhoods - “promotion” evinced by the straight teeth and the good shoes of the children. Though his younger brothers had been officers in the 54th Massachusetts, James showed no comparable interest in how African-Americans were faring, I think because he saw them as permanent aliens, unassimilable and fit only to serve. He whimpered over
the apparently deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of personal service, having been throughout a lively surprise. One had counted, with some eagerness, in moving southward, on the virtual opposite - on finding this deficiency, encountered right and left at the North, beautifully corrected; one had remembered the old Southern tradition, the house alive with the scramble of young darkies for the honour of fetching and carrying…
He pitied the southern gentry as “the people in the world the worst ministered to” and added that he could have “shed tears” when “reflecting that it was for this they had fought and fallen.” A “group of tatterdemalion darkies” at a rail station in Virginia prompted him to advise Northerners that, when considering the “formidable question, which [rises] suddenly like some beast that had sprung from the jungle,” they should remember that “the Southern black” is so repulsive, so “ragged and rudimentary,” as to “disabuse a tactful mind of the urgency of preaching, southward, a sweet reasonableness about him.” (Of course, they appear “ragged and rudimentary” because their nation was designed, by law and by violent custom, to make and to keep them that way - but this truth has, historically, passed over the heads of most white people.) More contemptuous of native-born blacks than of European immigrants, James presents the reversed image of General Sherman, who announced, in an 1888 essay published in the North American Review (where seven installments of The American Scene would appear in 1905-6), that he had at last come round to black male suffrage. After all, he wrote, they are Americans, and so more familiar than the “Bohemians who reach Castle Garden by thousands every day of the year.” To further complicate this picture of WASP racism, I’ll add that Sherman would have found James’s sensitivity to the plight of Indians mawkish and soft-hearted.
In Philadelphia James found New York’s opposite, a society consanguineous and calm. Washington, too, offered a contrast, a “City of Conversation” (especially so to a guest of Henry Adams) where, socially, the business man wasn’t the sole category of male. “It took no greater intensity of the South than Baltimore could easily give” for him to feel “the huge shadow of the War,” though in Richmond he at first felt nothing - the drab, sour, Northern-looking city was not “grandly sad,” lacked “a nobleness of ruin,” and did not match his “lurid, fuliginous, vividly tragic” idea of it; but the artist was there to admonish the aesthete, and James discovered that an aborted capital is naturally drab and sour, and quite interesting for that. By Charleston he was reconciled to straining to see historic romance, and he accepted Florida as a primeval blank, “a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a Sphinx,” still less of a Cleopatra.
Beneath the aesthete who deplored ugliness, beneath the artist who lamented the lack of associational “thickness” needed for his practice of fiction, there sat, animating both, a patriot of sorts, one brooding over the consequences of careless greed and plutocratic nihilism. For James aesthetic impressionability and novelistic analysis were tools to detect and describe the forces he thought menaced “continuity, responsibility, transmission.” James’s method of detection and description, Brooks writes, was to “latch on to an apparently telling detail” and elaborate “an idea that, under the pressure of his imagination and the work of his prose, develops into a kind of imagistic anthropological vision.” The American Scene has a “figural” texture - James’s “language of analysis, eschewing the statistical and the journalistic, found its greatest truth in a continuously analogical and metaphorical discourse.” In James’s “metaphoricity” aspects of the landscape frequently figure as foundling children - abandoned, “unaffiliated,” “unchristened.” And James’s advocacy of architectural preservation, dignified urbanity, and the maintenance of public art and amenity carries a stern warning: a society that builds things so oppressive no one becomes attached to them, and demolishes everything before it can begin to get old, will never be anything but “expensively provisional,” and barely habitable. The American Scene has plenty to make one wince, but enough of its writing is beautiful, enough of its analysis usable; and Brooks is to be thanked for bringing this complicated book closer to our eyes.
September 5, 2025
Beautifully written, elegant style. Yet lacks the most important essence of a great book - depth.
Read to entertain yourself for a train ride, not to satisfy the curiosity of a mind.
Read to entertain yourself for a train ride, not to satisfy the curiosity of a mind.
May 1, 2025
I have an inexplicable fascination with Henry James.
He wrote almost exclusively about wealthy ultra-refined effete types from England, Europe and the upper crust in America. He wrote mostly about their problems with their love affairs. I have no interest in those types of people or those kinds of problems.
He wrote in a style that I find unreadable. He loved paragraph long sentences that twist and double back on themselves that could be replaced by "He was unhappy" or "She wasn't sure what he meant." I have tried and failed to make it through one of his long novels every ten years or so. I have given up each time.
Yet, I am fascinated by the guy. He came from an upper middle-class family in Boston and then New York City. He moved to England and remade himself into an aloof master. His books were never best sellers, but they sold enough, and everyone agreed that he was an important author. He lived as a bachelor. He is usually assumed to have been what was called "a confirmed bachelor" but there is no definitive evidence.
Leon Edel's five volume biography of Henry James is brilliant. He turns this seemingly boring life into a great story. Mostly, Henry sat in a room and wrote novels and stories. He wrote a huge amount in his lifetime. He was, however, one of those people who knew everyone and everyone who met him felt the need to write about it. I find him fascinating.
This book by Peter Brooks is a wonderful project. In 1904, after being in England and Europe for twenty years, Henry decided to visit America. He came for ten months. He spent time in Boston and New Hampshire with his brother William. He traveled by train to NYC, Philadelphia, the Midwest, the South and California. He wrote a travelogue about the first half of his trip but never got around to writing the second volume.
Brooks, a professor of literature at Yale, uses the trip as a way to approach Henry. Some of Henry's reactions are just funny. He hated elevators, which he was seeing for the first time. He described 'the religion of elevators" as the worship of a "packed and hoisted basket". He appreciates some of what he finds in America. The dentist and the shoes were better in America.
Much of his home country disappoints him. Businessmen are worshipped because they make money even when they are bores. American Hotels were phony and pretentious.
His relationship with his brother William was very complicated. William was a famous philosopher and psychologist. He was also a brilliant writer. His clear and lucid prose was the opposite of Henry's. The brothers had a strained relationship. William discouraged him from visiting America. William also left for a trip to Europe while his brother was visiting America. William once referred to Henry as "my younger, and shallower and vainer brother.". He described his writing style as "perverse". Brooks does a nice job exploring the relationship.
Henry was a master at picking up nuances. When he traveled in the South, he noted the defiance that came from the necessity to protect the "eternal false position" of slavery. He dismisses the attacks on Jews and Irish in New York City by asking, 'who or what is an alien when it comes in a country peopled from the first by migrations?" He asks, compared to the Indians, "who is not an alien.?"
Brooks also looks at his reception by Americans. Henry was a celebrity. Newspapers interviewed him in every city he visited. They usually treated him as an oddity. His lectures, which funded the trip, were well attended, popular and lucrative. There were many who were put off by his manner. Teddy Roosevelt, who he had known since boyhood, had him to the White House for dinner, but privately described him as "a miserable little snob."
This is an excellent snapshot of Henry James.
He wrote almost exclusively about wealthy ultra-refined effete types from England, Europe and the upper crust in America. He wrote mostly about their problems with their love affairs. I have no interest in those types of people or those kinds of problems.
He wrote in a style that I find unreadable. He loved paragraph long sentences that twist and double back on themselves that could be replaced by "He was unhappy" or "She wasn't sure what he meant." I have tried and failed to make it through one of his long novels every ten years or so. I have given up each time.
Yet, I am fascinated by the guy. He came from an upper middle-class family in Boston and then New York City. He moved to England and remade himself into an aloof master. His books were never best sellers, but they sold enough, and everyone agreed that he was an important author. He lived as a bachelor. He is usually assumed to have been what was called "a confirmed bachelor" but there is no definitive evidence.
Leon Edel's five volume biography of Henry James is brilliant. He turns this seemingly boring life into a great story. Mostly, Henry sat in a room and wrote novels and stories. He wrote a huge amount in his lifetime. He was, however, one of those people who knew everyone and everyone who met him felt the need to write about it. I find him fascinating.
This book by Peter Brooks is a wonderful project. In 1904, after being in England and Europe for twenty years, Henry decided to visit America. He came for ten months. He spent time in Boston and New Hampshire with his brother William. He traveled by train to NYC, Philadelphia, the Midwest, the South and California. He wrote a travelogue about the first half of his trip but never got around to writing the second volume.
Brooks, a professor of literature at Yale, uses the trip as a way to approach Henry. Some of Henry's reactions are just funny. He hated elevators, which he was seeing for the first time. He described 'the religion of elevators" as the worship of a "packed and hoisted basket". He appreciates some of what he finds in America. The dentist and the shoes were better in America.
Much of his home country disappoints him. Businessmen are worshipped because they make money even when they are bores. American Hotels were phony and pretentious.
His relationship with his brother William was very complicated. William was a famous philosopher and psychologist. He was also a brilliant writer. His clear and lucid prose was the opposite of Henry's. The brothers had a strained relationship. William discouraged him from visiting America. William also left for a trip to Europe while his brother was visiting America. William once referred to Henry as "my younger, and shallower and vainer brother.". He described his writing style as "perverse". Brooks does a nice job exploring the relationship.
Henry was a master at picking up nuances. When he traveled in the South, he noted the defiance that came from the necessity to protect the "eternal false position" of slavery. He dismisses the attacks on Jews and Irish in New York City by asking, 'who or what is an alien when it comes in a country peopled from the first by migrations?" He asks, compared to the Indians, "who is not an alien.?"
Brooks also looks at his reception by Americans. Henry was a celebrity. Newspapers interviewed him in every city he visited. They usually treated him as an oddity. His lectures, which funded the trip, were well attended, popular and lucrative. There were many who were put off by his manner. Teddy Roosevelt, who he had known since boyhood, had him to the White House for dinner, but privately described him as "a miserable little snob."
This is an excellent snapshot of Henry James.
May 27, 2025
After 1875, author Henry James lived in Europe. In 1904, he made an extensive tour of his homeland, making it all the way out to California. His extensive notes of his travel and observations were to form the basis of two books, 'The American Scene' and 'The Sense of the West,' only the first of which was ever completed. -- This book examines James' cross-country journey, underpinning and elaborating upon what would appear in 'The American Scene.' It is oddly structured, however. First, the author outlines the James itinerary; then he details the various places and scenes and reflections. This seems to lead to a lot of repetition that perhaps a different approach might have made unnecessary. -- The author does draw in James's writings where appropriate and fleshes out biographical details that illuminate the trip (especially Henry's awkward relationship with his elder brother William, who comes across as rather quirky and even erratic at times). While I definitely enjoyed reading this book (and now want to read 'The American Scene'), I nevertheless found it dry at times. (Some of the driest spots were from the pen of Henry James himself, however: his later writing style is noted for its elliptical denseness...) One does not need to be a Henry James fan to read this book (it is peppered with brilliant insights into America at the turn of the 20th century -- Henry James was nothing if not a sharp observer of the world around him), but it doesn't hurt to be one, either.
April 23, 2025
Henry James returns to his birthplace after 20 years living in Paris and the UK. Following his arrival in New York he travels across America examining how the country has changed since his departure. James published a book about his travels titled "The American Scene"
However in this book Peter Brooks explores and discusses James's approach and decisions he made regarding the "new" America he encountered. An interesting read about the changes he experienced both good and bad.
However in this book Peter Brooks explores and discusses James's approach and decisions he made regarding the "new" America he encountered. An interesting read about the changes he experienced both good and bad.
August 14, 2025
I struggled through the first two-thirds of Brooks' Balzac book, but my love for Henry convinced me that I'd enjoy this. And I did, very much. An odd book, but since there was no chance I'd ever read 'The American Scene', I'm glad to have this easy intro to that book and that period of James' life.
June 29, 2025
Nice to read about Henry's trip.
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